Month: January 2009

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Second Wave of Flickr/Getty Invites Being Sent “En Masse”

Flickr and Getty Images Begin Inviting Select Flickr Photographers Into Their Joint Stock Photography Business

Today on the Flickr blog Flickr is announcing that the “second phase” of their partnership with Getty Images is launching and says that a new round of invitations to participate in the stock photography program are being sent out “en masse.” Flickr says that the new service will formally launch in March. Flickr has an updated FAQ on the program here.

An interesting side note to the new offering is that if you are selected for inclusion in this program you will need to change the license on any Creative Commons photos put up for sale to “all rights reserved,” on Flickr.

From the Flickr FAQ:

“There is a chance one of your Creative Commons-licensed photos may catch the eye of a perceptive Getty Images editor. You are welcome to upload these photos into the Flickr collection on Getty Images, but you are contractually obliged to reserve all rights to sale for your work sold via Getty Images. If you proceed with your submission, switching your license to All Rights Reserved (on Flickr) will happen automatically.

If you’re not cool with that, that’s totally cool. It just means that particular photo will need to stay out of the Flickr collection on Getty Images.”

As an advocate for the Creative Commons license personally I would have liked to have seen Getty/Flickr allow this license. There is no reason why a CC non commercial image cannot be sold and it would have been a good endorsement for this license if they could have figured out a way to work with it.

If you want to follow more of the Flickr Community’s reaction to this offering there are a few threads on Flickr that you can follow here and here. Note, you have to be logged into Flickr and allow yourself to see “adult” content in your settings in order to read the first thread.

Getty’s announcement on the new service is on their blog as well today where they say that “thousands” of invitations were sent out today. If you want to see what the invite looks like you can see this screenshot of it here.

Did you receive an invitations from Getty/Flickr today? If so or if not, what do you think of this new offering?

Related: Mike Arrington had an interesting blog post over at TechCrunch last week as well entitled, “The Photo Marketplace That Never Launched: Flickr Stock.”

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Sony PS3 Launches Photo Gallery Enhancement Firmware Upgrade

Picture 8Sony today announced a firmware update to their PS3 that adds significant photo functionality to the popular PS3 gaming console.

The system software update 2.60 becomes available tomorrow and now offers a new Photo Gallery application allowing users to better manage, sort and control the presentation of their photos on their PS3s. With the new upgrade users will now be able to sort their photos by color, age, and even facial expressions like smiling. In a video demo of the new technology Sony shows how parents might, for instance, pull together photos on their unit only of their children smiling and then run these photos as a slide show.

In addition to the Photo Gallery, firmware 2.60 provides guest access to PlayStation Store, enabling non-PlayStation Network members to browse the storefront’s downloadable content, including games, game trailers, and demos, along with more than 4,200 movies and TV shows. The firmware upgrade also upgrades the PS3 system’s video capability to support DivX 3.11 media files.

I wonder at what point in the future we might see Netflix Watch Now on the Sony PS3.

It is interesting to me to see gaming consoles more and more becoming home media boxes. Both Sony with their PS3 and Microsoft with their XBox360 seem to be increasingly going after both the gaming market as well as the home media market including things like music, photos and video.

One thing that both Microsoft and Sony still seem to be missing though is natural integration with the photo sharing site Flickr. Viewing your own photos on your XBox 360 or PS3 is a nice thing to be able to do, but being able to better display and share photos between friends and family through an online platform like Flickr would make an even more memorable experience. Imagine if, for instance, my parents could automatically subscribe on a PS3 or XBox360 to all of my photos tagged with my kids names on Flickr. Or imagine if you could pull up all of the most interesting photos of Barcelona Spain before going there on a trip. Integrating the photo experience with the vast archives of both personal and online photos ought to be what both Microsoft and Sony should be working on.

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CNN Uses Microsoft PhotoSynth Technology to Showcase Obama Inauguration

Microsoft PhotoSynth of Today's Inaguration on CNN

I’ve blogged a few times in the past about Microsoft’s interesting new PhotoSynth technology that allows the ability to stitch your photos together to create a multi layered almost 3D sort of view using multiple photographs.

In perhaps the most historically significant use of the technology yet, CNN today asked viewers to email in their photographs taken of Barack Obama being sworn in today as President. CNN then used the technology to create a mass collaborative composite PhotoSynth presentation of today’s event and the results are stunning.

If you want to check it out you can check it out here. The PhotoSynth by CNN works on both PCs and Macs. Once you land on the page, move your mouse around and click a bit to get the hang of it. You can zoom in and out of the PhotoSynth and look through the crowd for familiar faces. Using this technology you can see several famous celebrities in the crowd up close and personal. Steven Spielberg, Kate Capshaw, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Cusak and several other celebrities can be seen in the PhotoSynth.

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25 Things You May or May Not Know About Me

Ok, so internet peer pressure can be a powerful thing — and after seeing dozens of my online pals write up their lists of 25 things about them that people may or may not know as part of the “25 things meme,” I’m giving into the peer pressure.

Better late than never.

Testify1. I’m the oldest of eight children. 7 boys and one girl. When I was in kindergarten one of my siblings drowned and died in a swimming pool accident when he was one and a half — so now I have six brothers and one sister. I haven’t seen my oldest brother in years and he’s been part of a cult for over a decade now.

2. I rode my bicycle from Lincoln City Oregon to Rehobeth Beach Delaware when I was 15.

3. I was the editor-in-chief of my college newspaper. I graduated from Westmont College in Santa Barbara. After College in 1990 I moved to San Francisco.

4. The worst job I ever had was collecting carts for Gemco in Southern California when I was 16. I did the job for about 2 weeks while it rained constantly and finally quit but felt really nervous about quiting. I worked most of my high school and college days including several jobs telemarketing and interviewing and a job at Jack in the Box for a while.

5. I’ve voted in every Presidential election that I’ve legally been allowed to vote in. I voted for the following Presidential candidates: Dukakis, Perot, Dole, Bush, Bush, and Obama.

6. I started taking photographs when I was 7 or so. I got my first SLR camera when I was 15. The only formal training I’ve had in photography came for a class that I took at Glendale Community College when I was 15.

7. My favorite restaurant is Tommy’s Hamburgers (all over Southern California). My second favorite restaurant is Henry’s Hunan in San Francisco.

8. My right eye is far sighted and I never use it. Mostly I just see out of one eye, my left one.

9. My favorite kind of pie is cherry.

10. My favorite beer is Saporro.

11. When I was a kid I had a bb gun. I mostly just shot cans with it until my dad told me that I was allowed to shoot the birds that ate the fruit in our fruit tree. I shot a sparrow in the tree once and felt about as awful as I’ve felt. I never shot another living thing with that bb gun again.

12. I hate the sun and much prefer the rain and cooler weather.

13. My favorite author is Hunter S. Thompson. My favorite book is Catch 22.

14. My favorite film is Lost in Translation.

15. When I was five I used to get paid a nickel each week for bringing in the garbage cans. When I was eight or so my dad started paying me 25 cents per Hardy Boy book that I’d read. I read every single Hardy Boy book and early on became very interested in both earning money and reading.

16. My favorite color is green.

17. My favorite television series of all time is the Wire.

18. During the past 18 years I’ve worked in the financial markets. When I was in college I read the entire Los Angeles Times every single day, but every single day I’d throw out both the business and sports section without reading them.

19. I’m a proud father of four, 2 boys and 2 girls aged 4, 5, 6, and 8.

20. I’ve been married once and for 12 years to the same woman, mrsth. We went to Prague and Vienna for our Honeymoon.

21. I used to raise pet rabbits and sell them when I was a kid.

22. I first kissed a girl when I was 15 (Jody).

23. I shaved my head in high school once. I had longer hair in college.

24. The first time I ever got drunk it was by drinking a fifth of Bacardi that I’d smuggled up in a Mexican blanket from my high school Spanish Club’s field trip to Tijuana.

25. Someday I plan on walking across the United States with my camera and documenting both American portraits and the American landscape.

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Wordle Comparing President Obama’s Inagural Address With President Bush’s Farewell Speech

Wordle Comparing Obama's Inaugural Address vs President Bush's Farewell Speech

The wordle above compares the Inaugural Address presented earlier this morning by newly elected President Barack Obama (top) with President George Bush’s Farewell Speech (bottom).

No matter what your politics, we are very fortunate to live in a country where every 4 or 8 years a peaceful transfer of power takes place based on Democratic elections.

You can read President Barack Obama’s entire Inaugural Address here. You can read a transcript of President George Bush’s farewell speech here.

View large here.

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Drobo Requires Your Serial Number to Access Their Help Forums? That’s Really Lame

Drobo Requires Your Serial Number to Access Their Help Forums, WTF

So yesterday on one of my four drobos all of a sudden one of the lights went red. Usually this means that the drive may have gone bad (I’ve replaced one already). When I went to check on the drobo in the dashboard though, in this case it was showing that a drive was not in that bay when there clearly was one. So I took the drive out and reinserted it back into the drobo and the drobo recognized the drive again. But after I did this drobo began the process of re "protecting my data." The drobo messages reminded me that I could continue to use my files while this protection was going on but that I shouldn’t remove any drives during the process. I had an estimated time of recovery of about 32 hours. I love my drobos by the way and have been very happy with the job they do storing my photos.

So this morning I got up as I always do and went to upload some photos to flickr (my to be uploaded photos are kept on this drobo). Unfortunately, when trying to access that folder I got the following error message: "The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error." And so that’s why you’re seeing this screenshot this morning instead of new photos from me.

It looks like the drobo is still in the process of recovering (it says 22 hours remaining though and I feel like it should be further along as it’s been about 16 hours already) so I don’t want to try and reboot it or anything — but I can’t access any of my photos on this unit which is worrying me a little bit this morning.

So the first place that I like to try to go to start troubleshooting things like this is in community help forums. I often find that simple searches in community forums can often help you find the answers that you are looking for. Basically what I want to know is this. If I reboot my drobo during the recovery process (because I think it is stuck and has hanged somehow) will I risk losing data.

The problem with drobo’s community forum though is that you can’t read it without first registering with the site by giving them your email address and clicking on a confirmation email back from them. Personally I hate those kind of policies. Half the time the confirmation email ends up in your spam folder, sometimes you never get it, other times it takes an hour to get a simple email confirm. But because I need the help I went through that registration process. When I got into the system I checked off that I didn’t want their newsletter or other spamy sort of things and then went to upload my avatar (which I could not because I got an I/O device error on the same drobo). It asked me for my flickr ID which I thought was kind of cool and I put in thomashawk but got an error saying that they didn’t recognize my flickr ID. Oh well.

So I’m all ready to finally access the support forums but when I try to go into them I get still another screen denying me access. This time it wants me to put my *serial number* into the drobo system before I can have access. WTF? Are you kidding me? Why in God’s name should I be required to enter a serial number in order to access a help forum? That’s about the lamest thing I’ve ever seen. What, are they worried that people that don’t really own drobos are going to troll the forums talking about how to fix drobos? I can think of no reason why I would need to enter a serial number in order to access these forums.

So that’s were I am now. I crawled under my desk to try to see if I could ready the serial number anywhere on the back of my drobo but I can’t. So after I finish this blog post I’m going to need to go get a flashlight and crawl around under my desk some more to try and see if I can read it anywhere on the unit. Wherever it is printed it must be pretty small. Hopefully I actually get into the forums and hopefully I’m able to get this drobo back online at some point today and upload some new photos to Flickr so you don’t have to keep seeing this lame screenshot above.

Update: it turns out the serial number is actually on the bottom of the drobo on a sticker. I lifted one up while under my desk and got it and am now in the forums. Hopefully I get this one resolved soon.

Update: I searched in the forum and found this thread. which seemed to indicate that if a protection was hanging that I could shut down the drobo and restart it. So I did that and now all of my data is back. The drobo is no longer protecting my data though and the top bay (where there is a 750GB Seagate drive) is showing red and empty again. I think I may be having issues with this drive and will probably need to replace it. I’ll order another drive today and see if this fixes the problem. It’s great that I was able to find an answer to my question in the community support forum, but I still think it’s really lame that you have to enter a serial number to access it. I can understand the email verification to protect against spam, but even here I’d think they should let you browse, search and read the forums just not post to them without verification. But the extra step to require a serial number is lame. It prevents people who don’t own drobos from researching them. The less barriers to information the better I say.